PC Gamer’s Let’s Reboot feature “takes a look back at a classic in need of a new outing or a beloved series gone stale and asks how it might be best redesigned or given a kick up the backside for today’s gaming audience,” as they describe it. The rules of the thought experiment, such as they are, are fairly straightforward: “Assume a free hand, and a decent budget, but realistic technology and expectations.”

It sounds a horror, I have to admit, and this week’s target — conveniently timed for the announcement of Shroud of the Avatar, I suspect — is the Ultima series.

Here’s the start:

First up, our Ultima is going to be a single-player game – for a couple of reasons. First is the classic reason, that it makes it easier to be a hero. Second… the ethics of Ultima and the realities of online life are as bad a mix as an angry swarm of bees and an offensive balloon animal trying to live as roommates. Ultima was a series predicated on virtues of honesty and humility and valour and compassion. Ultima Online took that tradition… and became a charnel house nightmare. Subsequent attempts like A Tale In The Desert and Second Life haven’t exactly convinced me that anonymity and virtual worlds are the best way to explore questions of honour rather than A/S/L.

Here’s an attempt to gin up a little controversy:

This is never addressed in the game, but essentially the moment ‘wise’ Lord British put out a call for an Avatar, he doomed his entire world. Every single sequel – every single one – can be traced back to this one guy. The Shadowlords of Ultima V are the result of him vanquishing an earlier foe without cleaning up properly, the gargoyle invasion is his fault for dooming their homeland, and the dimension-conquering villain of Ultima VII-IX is literally his evil self, as split off and made super-powerful when he achieved Avatardom. In fairness, this wasn’t actually the original plan for the trilogy, but it’s canon now.

Here’s a suggestion to make it edgier:

The actual game is based on a few key concepts – doing good for its own sake, the fallibility of heroes, and the consequences of heroism. As the Avatar, you get a certain implied moral authority. But you’re not the Avatar this time. You’re just a regular Britannian – either gender, of course – growing up in the Humility focused town of New Magincia. For character creation, we see slices of that – vignettes of your upbringing where you faced situations others would walk away from, and not always in your favour. At fourteen for instance, you might intervene in a mugging in a city’s alley and get a choice of intervening and buying the victim time to escape, earning yourself a thrashing, or launching an attack that leads to a few days in the cells after the victim runs and the town guard arrests everyone left.

Does that deter you? No. Because that’s what the Avatar would have done.

And here’s a link to the Ultima Dragons ripping the article apart on Facebook.